Held Hostage by History

The discussion went on like this for a while, them arguing with me, and me amazed and bewildered, not understanding why they were so angry at me. Then, suddenly, my father was crying, his voice breaking. "We had friends who were killed, just for being in the government," he said, pressing his hands together and bringing them up to his face. Across the table from him, my mother's eyes began filling too.

Suddenly, I couldn't wait to get out of there. I felt cringingly awful to have caused my parents pain--breaking the cardinal rule of immigrant daughterhood--but somehow even worse that there was nothing I could do to make it better. They weren't hearing me.

Over the next few days, the argument hovered in my mind. I repeated it to Rob; I called friends and told them about it; I found myself flashing back to it in the shower and at work. One exchange, in particular, kept coming back to me.

"We lived through the war," my mother had said a couple of times.

"Mom," I said, "I was there, too. I lived through it, too."

"But you were little. We lived through it..."

I hadn't really heard the end of my mom's point. To me, the war and my family's emigration might as well be a scar across my flesh. They'd cost me everything I'd counted on as a kid: my friends, my first language, my country, my sense of the world as benevolent and secure. All that was replaced with a life in which I was an outsider, struggling to learn how to act, what to say, how to be. That experience--the sudden poverty, the stress, the constant ache of loss, and, most of all, the sense of being alone, bobbing in a huge sea--defines me to this day, often in ways I wish weren't so. And yet to my mother, it seemed the war was not something that had happened to me.

Back at the restaurant, my father had said that maybe the article had been a good thing in that it would start us talking about the war. It was something we had never really done. Between my parents and I, the war had never been a topic, it had been a looming emotion--a dangerous cloud that we kept from storming by ignoring it. My parents had lost everything coming to the United States, and, over the years, I had internalized their aversion to dwelling on what had been lost. It was too painful; they were too busy; they wanted to move on. Even after the Sandinistas were voted out in the elections of 1990, and many of their friends started filing paperwork to regain property lost during the war, my family resisted. We weren't going back, my father said, so there was no point.

And, to tell the truth, I had never done much to find out about the war on my own. The few times I'd picked up an article or a book, I'd been turned off by the picture they painted of people like those in my family--middle class or wealthy, who had opposed the revolution and left the country when it happened. The heartless aristocrats I read about, who defended their privilege tooth and nail before swanning off to Miami with stolen millions, didn't jibe at all with the reality I'd experienced--the powdered milk we drank because we couldn't afford anything else, our struggle to rebuild.

I wanted to re-engage with my parents, but I didn't want to find myself helpless again, feeling guilty, ignorant and somehow aggrieved. What I wanted was something that would bring emotion and fact together, something that would give me a touchstone for understanding my family's tortured history.

I'd begin, I decided, by finding the news photograph of my mother taken on August 23, 1978, during one of the most audacious moments of the Nicaraguan civil war. The day before, about a dozen Sandinistas rebels had defied popular wisdom about the invincibility of Somoza's army by taking over the huge downtown building known as the Palacio Nacional, or National Palace, which housed the country's legislature and several ministries. In doing so, they'd taken roughly 1,500 people hostage. My mother, a 31-year-old secretary, had been one of them.

A Chilean friend once told me, apropos of immigrant life, that most of what you learn about your family, you learn from other people. This is true--if you have other people around, and if you're inclined to ask questions.